Why The Don’s First Moves Underline ‘Trump Hai Toh Mumkin Hai’ – News18
Last Updated:January 22, 2025, 11:10 IST
India will be watching with great interest how he tackles the Deep State, many of whose shakers and movers are shaking and moving

The Golden Age that Trump 2.0 has promised will happen mainly via the sectors they are from: AI, space and their concomitant technological spinoffs. (AP Photo)
The Don has trumped and stumped them all. The Beltway elites had barely caught their breaths as news came of Joe Biden’s shameless prospective pardon of his ‘crime family’ in his last minutes as POTUS, that his predecessor and successor announced his intention to make good all his poll promises. Drill Baby Drill. Close borders. Take back the Panama Canal. Only two genders. Tariffs. Gulf of America. Drug cartels as terrorists. Pardons for all “J6 hostages”. And God.
Indeed, for some, the frigid morning of January 20, 2025, was the day their worst nightmares came true. No last-minute pressure, nerves or uncertainty made Trump water down his long-stated objectives that had been reported by the blatantly partisan (read anti-Trump) media with a mixture of scorn and disbelief. Their unspoken refrain was that no one in their right mind would do half the stuff that the Orange Man had promised. But he proved them both right and wrong.
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Because he did what he said he would do, and not in half-measures. It has been Full-on Don from the get-go. The mood in the media was first scepticism and then “offence is the best defence” with the help of flailing Democrats, insisting that his Executive Orders (EO) are the first steps towards dictatorship, never mind that these are a legal part of his powers. Who would fact-check the self-appointed fact-checkers anyway? Wait a minute, what was the EO from Don on that?
This is America’s 2014 moment. The man of the moment has squarely stood up for the silent majority whose votes brought him back to the highest office—blue-collar workers, Middle America, Black men, Hispanics—when the urban liberal elites, mainstream media and even grandees of his own Republican Party had written him off as politically untouchable for, well, instigating a deadly riot and assault on the Idea of America. We Indians are familiar with that narrative.
Many have been left breathless by the sheer number of fronts that Trump has decided to open up, from hitting at China’s rise to supremacy via the liberal advocacy of ESG concerns to the watering down of meritocracy by the insistence on DEI. It has indeed been a bonfire of acronyms, including WFH, BIPOC, CRT and LGBTQIA not to mention WHO, UN and EU. The only abbreviation Trump emphatically reiterated on Monday is the one he invented: MAGA.
Trump has called time on the harnessing of the international “consensus” that—amazingly—has served to benefit China. Given the pre-emptive pardon for Hunter Biden who had links with China, a closer look at the US’s free pass to that country in the past four bears scrutiny that the media and favourite commentators will probably try to downplay. Instead, the effort is to seek an equivalence of the Bidens’ actions, covert and overt, with Trump throwing a lifeline to TikTok!
Pulling the US out of the World Health Organisation (again) should negate charges of TikTok-related Sinophilia as his EO did not mince words on the reason: due to its “mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states”. Fauci may have been pardoned, but WHO has not.
Talk about missing the wood for the trees—and billionaires for the bustiers— it seemed to have escaped the commentariat that there was a method in Trump’s madness when it came to the $1.2 trillion worth of tech wealth gathered in the Rotunda. The Golden Age that Trump 2.0 has promised will happen mainly via the sectors they are from: AI, space (remember the flag-on-Mars goal) and their concomitant technological spinoffs. Maybe they expected Greta Thunberg.
In 2020, “tech bros”—bosses and employees—overwhelmingly donated (and voted) for Biden-Harris and were complicit in the egregious censorship of free speech, especially during the pandemic. In 2024 the West Coast liberals beat a path to Mar-a-Lago on the opposite coast instead. Rather than understand what changed, the US media has viciously turned on “broligarchs”, echoing Biden’s dark farewell speech warning about oligarchs. Whose unconscious bias?
The Musk behind The Man, of course, continues to be the lightning rod for much of the high-voltage critique of everything Trumpian, real or imaginary. Meanwhile, although wokeness will be an early casualty of his return to the White House, the Trump Derangement Syndrome could be the new pandemic—limited to pockets, including the Beltway. And India will be watching with great interest how he tackles the Deep State, many of whose shakers and movers are shaking and moving.
“Impossible is what we do best” asserted Trump on Monday. If managing to kiss First Lady Melania’s cheek beneath her forbiddingly brimmed hat was not proof enough of that, making it to the podium instead of languishing in a jail cell as many had conspired to engineer since 2021 certainly was. And too, for more than merely the MAGA faithful. Indians may like to offer Americans an apt desi phrase for this astonishing phoenix effect: “Trump hai toh mumkin hai”.
The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.